Thursday, May 24, 2012

Even Experts...

First I want to thank everyone at CNCH who took my classes. You were all spectacular! I can't believe how enthusiastic everyone was to learn new card weaving techniques! The conference was very smoothly run, and I think everyone had a great time.

So, I've been teaching card weaving for about 4 years now, been doing it twice as long. And I've seen all of the mistakes my students make. Several I used to make myself frequently. Evidently, I'm still very capable of making those same mistakes.

This little self-admission is out there to give confidence to all you new card weavers that even when you have 100s of bands under your belt (that's a strange image), you can still really screw up if you aren't paying attention.

I was warping just 10 cards to weave some shoe laces I wanted to bring on a driving trip this Memorial Day weekend. Granted I was in a bit of a rush, but so are most of my students. I noticed on the second card that the first card hadn't followed the same path on my circular warp as the second which was correct. Okay, I can fix that. Seven cards in I noticed while checking my Zs switching to Ss that in the sixth card I put half of the threads in Z and the other half S. Never done that before! Untie, rethread, continue. Um, why does card eight and nine have the same colors in the same holes? Well, they don't, I threaded eight with colors from draft card 9. Rethread!

Needless to say, I finally finished warping that mess. Gee, only 30% of the cards were put on incorrectly the first time! And no, no wine or other substances were imbibed before this debacle.

So yes, even experts really screw up sometimes. I guess the difference between an expert and a novice is that I quickly saw, before continuing too far, that there were mistakes and immediately knew how to repair them quickly. But that's just experience folks, so keep those cards turning and you too will become experienced!